AMD releases tweaked Windows 10 Ryzen power plan settings

AMD has announced continued work on tweaking software support for its latest Ryzen processors and its SenseMI technology, building a new power plan for Windows 10 which helps to improve responsiveness.

First unveiled by the company in December last year, SenseMI is the name given to a suite of technologies built into the company's Zen-architecture Ryzen chips and designed to improve power efficiency while boosting on-demand performance. SenseMI is split into five core technologies: Pure Power, which comprises more than 100 embedded sensors which monitor the chips' voltage, power draw, and temperature at an individual-component level; Precision Boost, which modifies the current clock speed in 25MHz increments at a 1,000Hz polling rate; Neural Net Prediction and Smart Prefetch, which aim to more accurately predict the upcoming instructions and data requirements of programs compared with existing algorithms; and Extended Frequency Range (XFR), which automatically - though to a minor extent - boosts the chips' clock speed above their default maximum when adequately cooled.

In theory, SenseMI should add up to considerable power savings without sacrificing performance - but only if the host operating system knows how to make sense of the platform. That's an improvement AMD, in Robert Hallock's latest community update, claims to have made in the form of a new power plan for Windows 10 which improves the on-demand performance without harming power draw.

Installing the power plan, AMD has claimed following internal testing, can improve responsiveness to a point where the default 'Balanced' plan can now rival the all-out 'High Performance' plan - yet still clock down and save power when you're not running CPU-intensive applications. For now, the power plan is a manual download; AMD has indicated it's waiting for user feedback on power usage and responsiveness before making it, or a modified version thereof, an automatically installed part of its official chipset drivers.

The customised power plan settings can be downloaded from the company's official blog post now.